The Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Isa Pantami, has disclosed that the Federal Government is planning to offer incentives such as grants, tax and fiscal motivations, startup labelling, seed funding, and tax holidays in its bid to offer support to startups in the country.
According to him, the National Startup Bill, the National Council for Digital Innovation and Entrepreneurship, the National Policy for the Development of Indigenous Content in the Telecommunications Sector, among others, are examples of the government’s commitment to enacting and implementing policies that enable the ecosystem.
Pantami said, “The importance of a vibrant, functional innovation ecosystem cannot be underscored, and that is why we have taken deliberate steps to organise this interactive session specifically, to address certain pertinent issues.
“Firstly, how to consolidate our ecosystem, secondly, to understand the market and its challenges, thirdly, to map out our market and set targets, to strengthen our networking strategies and more importantly, to collaborate and partner with the government.
This is key to the success of our ecosystem because the government has a major role to play in providing an enabling environment.”
He added that the presidency was ready to ensure the proper execution of the startup bill.
According to the Director-General, National Information Technology Development Agency, Inuwa Abdullahi, the agency has come up with a scheme to identify talented startups and place them in developed hubs for training and incubation.
He said, “We came up with a scheme called Technology Innovation and Entrepreneurship Support scheme. It is a scheme designed to identify talented startups of youths with ideas, place them in developed hubs for training and incubation and at the end we have what we called startups vouchers we give them that will help them as seed funding to develop their products and services.”